OCTOBER 27, 1997:
You wake up an hour-and-a-half early because you're
afraid of being late. The night before, you weren't able to sleep more than
two hours at a stretch. Instead of being tired, you're wide awake because
you're so nervous. Will the kids like you? Will you make a mistake? Will
you know any of the answers?

You
put on the outfit you laid out days before, the right combination of clothes
that says you're hip, comfortable, but authoritative. A quick bowl of cereal
and a cup of coffee later, and you're off, not knowing whether you'll succeed
brilliantly or fail miserably.

All of us are familiar with that first-day-of-school
anxiety, that unique combination of excitement and fear that comes from
entering a whole new world. But in this case it isn't a student who is obsessed
with what the kids will think -- it's the teacher.

Every year hundreds of new teachers enter the ranks
of the Memphis and Shelby County school systems. All have spent years training
for this day. Four years of college followed by at least one semester of
student teaching.

But no number of classroom lectures or hours in
front of real students at an experienced teacher's side can adequately prepare
a teacher for that day when he or she has to stand up in front of a room
full of kids and try to help them learn.

"It's like walking a high wire without a net,"
says one teacher who, after four years in the city-schools system, feels
he is just now getting a handle on how to run a class. "They've told
you everything they can in college and you've seen good, experienced teachers
teach and you've done it yourself, with them watching over your shoulder
making sure you don't screw up. But that day when you walk in the classroom
and realize you're the only adult and society is looking to you to prepare
these kids for life well, it's the scariest feeling in the world, and you're
convinced every mistake you make is going to be catastrophic."

BY HIS ACCOUNT, TONY BAER'S FIRST DAY IN front
of a classroom was a catastrophe.

"I came to school on the first day, and there
was no chalk for the blackboard; you had to go and buy your own," Baer
says of his initial day at Sherwood Junior High School. "I didn't have
any textbooks for the first two weeks of class. I went out and bought some
books with my own money just so the kids would have something to read during
the down time."

After those two weeks, Baer transferred to Treadwell
Elementary, switching to third grade, an age group on which he felt he could
have a more meaningful impact. But even there Baer felt frustrated with
the conditions under which he was being asked to teach.

"I was in a classroom with 36 kids; it was
the smallest class in the school," Baer says. "They kept promising
all year that they would give us one of those outdoor classrooms, and it
never came."

Baer is the kind of person you would think any
school system would love to have teaching for them -- young, bright, full
of ideals and passion.

"Pretty much, I just wanted to help the disadvantaged,"
he says. "That's pretty much the only reason I went to teacher's college."

In 1995, after receiving his teaching degree from
the University of Windsor just outside of Detroit, Baer moved here and obtained
a teaching position with the Memphis City Schools. Less than a year later,
he quit, worn down, he says, by a system of politicians, school administrators,
and even parents who undermined his best efforts to teach.

"As a teacher, you're essentially powerless
before the school system," Baer says. "I've heard a lot of the
inner-city schools are workable, but the problem is the administration and
whether or not they'll support you."

Mitchel Gertner agrees.

"The bureaucracy of education is terrible,"
says Gertner. "A teacher's opinion is not valued by anyone -- administration
or parents. The administration is overly accommodating to parents."

A 28-year-old from New Jersey, Gertner discovered
teaching during registration at Temple University. He was in line to register
for classes in sports medicine when he started playing with a little girl
waiting with her mother ("Can we keep him?" the girl asked when
they had to leave.). Someone told Gertner he would make a good teacher.
When it came time for graduate school at the University of Memphis, he switched
his field to education.

Gertner
now teaches eighth-grade American history at Southwind Middle School. After
four years on the job, he too feels exasperated with the system.

"I went into [teaching] headstrong, like I
could change the world," he says. "If I can change one person,
they can change another person I was gung-ho."

And while Gertner plans to continue teaching, today
he feels somewhat dispirited by student and parent apathy on one side and
administrative meddling on the other. "[Teachers] are like the frontline,
grunt soldiers," he says. "We're getting it from both ends."

Houston High art teacher and U of M graduate student
Louis Varnell, 28, understands the military analogy all too well. He has
worked with juvenile delinquents and abused children at a private school
in Chattanooga and is an avid Civil War buff, but says even hundreds of
mock military drills didn't prepared him for the confrontations he has encountered
with students in his classes.

"I was totally shocked at the lack of respect
they [students] had for teachers," Varnell says of his first reaction
to the teaching profession two years ago. "Students cuss at you and
challenge your authority. When I was growing up you just naturally had respect
for your teachers. You just didn't talk back or show them you were better
than them or even equal to them."

Varnell says he could have burnt out after his
first year because he had no control over his students.

"I took everything personally," he says.
"I spent a lot of time yelling or writing people up. But this year,
I reevaluated my approach."

While Varnell says he is less frustrated than last
year, the kids are bringing more emotional baggage with them to the classroom.

They come from homes where the parents do not pay
attention to grades or behavior, where parents are using drugs or alcohol.
They bring the problems of their neighborhoods into the school building.
While school used to be a sanctuary from bullies and scores were settled
outdoors after class, the school is now center stage for fistfights and
gunshots.

Programs that are in place to help both teachers
and students aren't proving effective -- they may even undermine a teacher's
authority. The state's Zero Tolerance Policy on violence was understood
to be a foolproof method of ridding the classroom of serious offenders.
But with no standard punishment in place, the punishments run the gamut
from suspensions to a slap on the hand.

Besides, teachers say suspensions are rarely effective,
with most kids seeing them as a holiday from school.

And alternative sites, schools set up for problem
children to attend temporarily, are effective but are not available for
students in kindergarten through sixth grade.

All this doesn't make a teacher's job any easier.
Instead, teachers are taking on the roles of counselor, mother, father,
friend, secretary, doctor, preacher, and police officer. Some actually find
time to teach math and science and English on the side. Others simply say,
"Forget it."

AMERICA'S TEACHERS TODAY ARE OLDER, better educated,
and have more experience than ever before, according to a study released
this summer by the National Education Association. The study, based on information
provided by a sample of the nation's 2.5 million schoolteachers, says that
almost 67 percent of the country's public schoolteachers are over the age
of 40, 54 percent have their master's degree or at least six years of college,
and 38 percent have been teaching more than 20 years, with the mean a hefty
16 years.

The spin that the teachers unions like to put on
this trend toward older teachers is that it means that today's students
enjoy the most experienced and trained teaching force ever. But while that
may bode well for today's students, it could spell disaster for the Class
of 2000 and beyond.

As with Medicare and Social Security, authorities
are predicting a crisis in the public school system as we head into the
next millennium. In 2010 the oldest of the baby boomers will reach retirement
age. And as the biggest generation in the nation's history begins to transfer
out of the workforce, they'll leave a void that will have to be filled by
a generation -- the so-called baby busters -- that is a full 11 percent
smaller than the preceding one. Making the labor shortage more pronounced
is the fact that the generation following the baby busters promises to be
even bigger than the baby boomers of 47 years ago.

These trends seem to point to a potentially devastating
teacher shortage in the near future. In fact, according to a report issued
last year by the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, a
nonpartisan group of educators, governors, and business leaders, the U.S.
will need to recruit 2 million teachers over the next 10 years to fill the
void.

But the current system of recruiting, training,
and placing teachers may not be sufficient to reach that goal. It's estimated
that nationwide as many of 50 percent of all new teachers leave the profession
within five years. While there are no local figures available, Memphis school
authorities insist their rates are lower. Some teachers who leave the profession
early in their careers never intended to stay long in the first place; they
shared a common attitude that teaching is just a career pit stop, someplace
to spend a few years until they figured out what they really wanted to do
or until something better came along.

Like
Tony Baer, though, just as many teachers leave because -- either due to
unreal expectations or harsh working conditions -- the system wore them
down. The long hours, the low pay, the unruly students, and the ineffectual
administration all combined to make them reevaluate why they went into teaching
in the first place. And for many, the result of that evaluation is "not
for this."

This, then, is the question: Can teacher educators
and school systems, across the country and here in Memphis, change the way
they work and make teaching more attractive to enough people to fill the
impending teacher gap? Can they attract new teachers who will enter the
field of education, not for money or job security, but because they genuinely
want to make a difference?

"I'M SEEING A HIGHER QUALITY of student now,"
says the University of Memphis' Dr. Cindi Chance. "I'm seeing people
who want to be teachers as opposed to those who settle on teaching because
they can't do anything else."

As the assistant dean of teacher education for
the university's College of Education, Chance helps head up an institution
that, along with Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, turns
out more teachers in Tennessee than any other institution in the state.

Despite a wide-ranging curriculum and a course
of study that requires at least one semesterof student teaching
before graduation, Chance admits that no amount of class work can adequately
prepare a first-time teacher for the realities of the job.

"It's difficult if not impossible to teach
the breadth of what [new teachers] are getting into," says Chance.
"Even with student teaching, it's difficult to see the magnitude. Every
school has its own culture the way things are done is different from school
to school."

Chance says that research shows it is an inability
to understand the school culture, an inability to access the bureaucracy
of the system, that most frustrates new teachers and drives them out of
the profession.

"It's not knowing where to go with problems,
how to get textbooks and supplies, how to cope with a problem child, that
upsets them," Chance says. "If they would just go to their more
experienced peers, they could probably find a lot of sympathy and help."

Tom Marchand, president of Memphis Education Association,
the labor group for area teachers, says that while he hasn't noticed many
teachers leaving the system, he does feel they are "at the end of their
rope. They are frustrated because of a lack of support from parents and
administrators."

One
way in which the U of M tries to help ease those frustrations and make the
transition to the classroom smoother is through a hotline which dispatches
a College of Education employee to provide on-site help to beleaguered teachers.

The college also runs a special First Year Teacher
Program, a monthly Saturday session where all first-year teachers, regardless
of what system they work in or whether they attended the U of M or not,
can come and ask questions of veteran educators.

"The people who lead these sessions are not
university people," says Chance. "They're successful teachers
who teach in the public school systems. And they are there to tell the new
teachers that what they are going through is very natural, and it will pass."

The U of M program seems like a more effective
form of the required mentoring program, which teams new teachers with veterans
who are supposed to help them get a handle on their job. The problem is
that, unlike states like California and Georgia which pay teachers extra
for working with their younger colleagues, Tennessee's mentoring program
isn't funded.

"That means that they have to mentor in addition
to their regular duties -- teaching classes, grading papers, making lesson
plans, not to mention the mountains of paperwork they have to do,"
Chance says.

It is her fervent hope that all the problems beginning
teachers face can be overcome, because at stake is what may be the most
gifted generation of teachers she has ever seen.

"It has become fashionable to work in service
roles again," says Chance, referring to the baby busters' well-documented
attraction to jobs that emphasize community service over financial gain.
"When I hear young people talk, it's not about achieving material things
like BMWs. It's about saving the world and trying to make a difference."

That's why, Chance says, it's so important to make
sure these teachers, who seem to want to make a genuine difference in young
people's lives, don't get driven away by the hardships of the system.